xiv, 277 pages : 24 cm

"The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today. Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control - immigration, the military, and welfare - and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state"

Includes bibliographical references and index

I. Nascent policing : Immigration : "A new species of undesirable immigrant": perverse aliens and the limits of the law, 1900-1924 -- Military : "We are merely concerned with the fact of sodomy": managing sexual stigma in the World War I-era military, 1917-1933 -- Welfare : "Most fags are floaters": the problem of "unattached persons" during the early New Deal, 1933-1935 -- II. Explicit regulation : Welfare : "With the ugly word written across it": homo-hetero binarism, federal welfare policy, and the 1944 GI Bill -- Military : "Finding a home in the army": women's integration, homosexual tendencies, and the Cold War military, 1947-1959 -- Immigration : "Who is a homosexual?": the consolidation of sexual identities in mid-twentieth-century immigration law, 1952-1983

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